Trying to Make Local News Search Easier With Marion’s Monocle

Trying to Make Local News Search Easier With Marion’s Monocle
By ResearchBuzz

It makes sense that the longer an active Web resource exists, the better it would get and the more features it would have. It stands to reason, right?

But that’s not always the case, and a good example is Google News. Ages ago it was possible for you to do a location: query with that part of Google search. You could specify a country or a state in the US and you could get news from sources in that state or country. Which was, as you might imagine, super-useful!

You can’t do that now. That syntax doesn’t work anymore.

Doesn’t it bother you that we’re spending time arguing about exactly how amazing ChatGPT is while at the same time you can’t search Google for news about Brett Farve from sources originating in Mississippi? Doesn’t it piss you off that while ad cookies are tracking every online move you make, you can’t easily make a Google News query as specific in location as North Carolina?

Maybe it is just me; I am pretty weird. But it does piss me off. It made me want to see if I could do it better with my janky balsawood client-side JavaScript.

So I started playing around and ended up with Marion’s Monocle.

Marion’s Monocle take’s information from a FCC TV Station license search by state (thank you for making your search results available in plain text, FCC! I love you!) and pairs the resulting TV stations with their official Web sites via Wikidata. You can then pick up to ten of them (Google has a query limit and some states have dozens of TV stations) which are then bundled into a Google search and opened in a new tab.

Let’s use an example from the screenshot. Say I want to do a news search for Daniel McKee but I want to limit my search to TV stations in Rhode Island, where he’s governor. I start here:

I use the pulldown menu to choose Rhode Island, enter Daniel McKee, and click the button. You’ll have to wait several seconds because it’s got to get the license data from the FCC and match it up with Wikidata. Do your hair toss, check your nails. Baby, how you feelin’? Good as hell? Okay excellent, you should have the results in the form of a checklist.

There will be duplicates, feel free to ignore them. Tick the checkboxes of the ones you find interesting and click the Search TV News Stations on Google button. It will take your original query, add site: searches for the TV stations you chose, and open the results in a new tab.

But wait, there’s more! If you click on the News tab from here it will give you somewhat different results.

Mmmm, local news search. Delicious!

I find this works pretty well by itself to give results a strong local bent, but sometimes you’ll find a topic that’s being so exhaustively covered by nation/world media that syndicated stories are overwhelming your search results. If that happens, try adding reporter to your query.

You can also try exclusive, though I find it doesn’t work quite as well.

I haven’t found much bugginess apart from the duplicates. Just please be patient because sometimes the FCC search is a little pokey.

The boundaries for my imaginings are pretty strict – client-side JavaScript, free resources, and APIs that are as open as possible – but something something something mother of invention, right? I consider unfocused Web search a huge, ongoing problem  – a constant source of Gizmo-inspiring puzzles. Stay tuned.

December 19, 2022 at 01:35AM
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Hayom Yom, Battle of Rhode Island Association, Ownership Costs for Electric Cars, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 18, 2022

Hayom Yom, Battle of Rhode Island Association, Ownership Costs for Electric Cars, More: Sunday ResearchBuzz, December 18, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Anash: New Website Culls Resources On Hayom Yom. “Marking 80 years since the publication of the sefer Hayom Yom, a new website was launched to serve as a platform for all things Hayom Yom, including audio and video shiurim and other resources.”

What’s Up Newp: Battle of Rhode Island Association receives grants from the Society of the Cincinnati and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “The website is an exchange of information about Rhode Island’s Revolutionary War events, many no longer nor widely known, from the earliest protests against the Royal Navy through the attack on the HMS Gaspee, British occupation, Siege of Newport, 1778 Battle, arrival of the French allies, and the march from Rhode Island to Yorktown.”

CleanTechnica: New Total Cost Of Ownership Tool For Electric Cars. “Various assumptions go into any cost of ownership analysis — gas price over the timeframe analyzed, electricity price over the same period, efficiencies of the cars being compared, resale value at the end of the comparison period, maintenance and operational costs, amount of cash put down at purchase, interest rate, and more! … The International Energy Agency (IEA) is now launching a tool of its own.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Gizmodo: YouTube Will Tell You if You’re Being an Asshole in Comments. “YouTube wants you to stop being mean. As YouTube comments continue to serve as a place to harbor negativity and bad tempers, the platform is rolling out a way to let you know if your comment is too rude.”

The Verge: The Accord will be Honda’s first car to offer Google built-in. “The top-trim 2023 Honda Accord Touring will include Google services like the Play Store that can run Android apps, and the car can receive software updates over the air.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: Google Launches Visual Guide To Search Elements. “For example, ask: ‘How do I customize the image that appears in search snippets?’ That question could refer to three different things: a text result image, an image thumbnail, or a favicon. The person asking the question may not find the help they want when using such vague terms. Google’s new guide makes it easy to identify the exact search element you need help with, so you can get more relevant answers.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Stars and Stripes: Swipe right: New social app allows military spouses to connect, create friendships . “A 33-year-old Army spouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., has set his sights on solving the age-old problem for service members of how to make friends after a switch to a new duty station.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Richmond sheriff puts $1,385 price tag on Times-Dispatch request for routine payroll records. “In response to a Richmond Times-Dispatch request for payroll records about who the jail employs and how much they earn, Sheriff Antionette Irving’s records officer quoted a price of $1,385. Payroll records are explicitly not protected from FOIA under the Virginia Administrative Code. When they receive requests from the public, agency records officers estimate prices based on how many hours employees will need to produce the records. Sheriffs sign off on those labor estimates.”

Wall Street Journal: Rise of Open-Source Intelligence Tests U.S. Spies. “As Russian troops surged toward Ukraine’s border last fall, a small Western intelligence unit swung into action, tracking signs Moscow was preparing to invade. It drew up escape routes for its people and wrote twice-daily intelligence reports. The unit drafted and sent to its leaders an assessment on Feb. 16, 2022, that would be eerily prescient: Russia, it said, would likely invade Ukraine on Feb. 23, U.S. East Coast time.”

New York Times: A Traditional Exchange? FTX Was Anything But.. “Cryptocurrency trading platforms like FTX have acquired a sheen of legitimacy in recent years by billing themselves as exchanges — creating an association with staid and trusted financial institutions like the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. But the implosion of FTX shows just how different crypto exchanges are from their more well known, and highly regulated, counterparts.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Greater Greater Washington: A one-building quest to undelete suburban DC history. “What follows is the saga of identifying the original builder/tenant of this structure, and piecing together its history over half a century. It’s every bit as tricky and puzzling as detective work or archaeology. I love the challenge, and I also love uncovering bits of very recent, seemingly ordinary, and mostly forgotten commercial and land-use history. Enjoy.”

New York Times: The Nicest Place Online? It Might Just Involve Identifying Sea Slugs.. “As civil discourse online and off increasingly proves elusive, a website devoted to identifying plants and animals may be teaching humans how to get along.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 18, 2022 at 06:27PM
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Samford University, Silk Road Textiles, Google Photos, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 17, 2022

Samford University, Silk Road Textiles, Google Photos, More: Saturday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Samford Library News: Our NEW Digital Archive… is LIVE!. “Alongside collections containing hundreds of photographs of Alabama churches and religious life, the digital archive also includes the William E. Hull Sermons Collection, which is comprised of over 500 sermons, notes and presentations by Hull, a world-renowned theologian and former provost, university professor and research professor at Samford University.”

UNESCO: Publication of Textiles and Clothing Volume of the ‘Thematic Collection of the Cultural Exchanges along the Silk Roads’. “UNESCO is pleased to announce the online publication of the ‘Textiles and Clothing’ volume of the ‘Thematic Collection of the Cultural Exchanges along the Silk Roads’…. Aimed at a broad general audience, this volume on ‘Textiles and Clothing along the Silk Roads’ takes the reader around the world, from Java to West Africa, Scandinavia to the Philippines. It charts a fascinating history, from the ways in which patterns and dyes were elements of cultural imitation, hybridization and exchange, to how particular motifs and symbols were adopted across cultures and used as means to influence.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Droid Life: Bring In That New Year With a Sick Google Photos Collage. “Google Photos has a few updated collage options to bring in that new year, so if you’re feeling festive and have some photos you want to share, now might be a good time.”

USEFUL STUFF

WIRED: How to Use Tech to Create an Ethical Will . “With no formal rules or requirements, ethical wills can reflect your personality. They allow you to impart wisdom, beliefs, and family history and celebrate life’s most meaningful moments while sharing blessings and future dreams through letters, video messages, audio recordings, scrapbooks, and artwork. You can convey life lessons through old photos, favorite quotes or prayers, cherished items of clothing, secret family recipes, lush lullabies, or treasured stories with signature punch lines. The trick is to speak from the heart.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Farnham Herald (England): Peeps into the Past: Project to digitise 130 years of Herald history ready for lift off. “A project to digitise more than 130 years of local history immortalised in the pages of the Herald – and make it free to access for the public online – is set to take off in 2023 after a frenzy of activity behind the scenes by a dedicated band of volunteers over the past 12 months. The Herald Digital Archive Project was first launched in November 2019 and quickly attracted a flurry of support from potential volunteers, local history groups and other organisations. Unfortunately the pandemic stalled the project’s roll-out.”

Los Angeles Times: Huntington Library acquires the papers of Thomas Pynchon. “The Huntington Library has acquired the archives of Pynchon, 85 — a collection of typescripts and drafts of each of his novels, handwritten notes, correspondence with publishers and research — which were prepared by his son, Jackson Pynchon, the museum announced on Wednesday. In all, 48 boxes packed with Pynchon’s writings will be archived and available to scholars at the library in San Marino by the end of 2023.”

MIT Technology Review: How to live-tweet the Cultural Revolution, 50 years later. “I confess, I’m deeply addicted to Twitter, and amid all the speculation about whether it would collapse under Elon Musk’s leadership, I found myself thinking about what’s made this platform special. It’s not just about talking to celebrities and politicians as if we were in the same room, but also about connecting with strangers because you’re both interested in the same random thing.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Reuters: Israel to Crack Down on Social Media Companies to Tackle Offensive Content. “Israel said on Wednesday it plans to regulate social media companies such as TikTok, YouTube, Meta’s Facebook and Twitter, following in the steps of the European Union in tackling illegal and offensive online content.”

Associated Press: Oregon city drops fight to keep Google water use private . “Residents of The Dalles, Oregon, are learning how much of their water Google’s data centers have been using to cool the computers inside the cavernous buildings — information that previously was deemed a trade secret.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Ars Technica: Meet Ghostwriter, a haunted AI-powered typewriter that talks to you. “On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The ‘ghost’ inside the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 18, 2022 at 01:28AM
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Abraham Lincoln Artifacts, MacKenzie Scott Philanthropy, Ukrainian Books for Children, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 17, 2022

Abraham Lincoln Artifacts, MacKenzie Scott Philanthropy, Ukrainian Books for Children, More: Saturday ResearchBuzz, December 17, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

WMAY: ALPLM Now Offering 3D Online Renderings Of Artifacts. “It’s a new way to get an up-close look at dozens of artifacts in the collection of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The library has now released an online 3-D gallery of around 100 different items, allowing you to get a full 360-degree view of the items, using your mouse to rotate the image and zoom in and out.”

GeekWire: MacKenzie Scott launches new website that details her giving process and lists recipients of $14B. “Since her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott has given away more than $14 billion to more than 1,600 nonprofit organizations, which are all listed on the new site, along with the amount of money received. She has stayed out of the limelight during that time, only penning a handful of essays to describe her donations.”

Ukrainian Jewish Encounter: Free electronic books for children in Ukrainian. “The Librarian Bear invites children aged 3-10 and their parents to join the ‘Let’s Read Together’ club in Ukrainian. This is a virtual reading club of the ‘Let’s Read’ digital library. In this club, you will be able to receive electronic children’s books, cartoons, movies, exercises, and trivia for children every week for free.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google’s making code formatting a breeze in Docs. “Google Docs is getting a new feature that will make it easier to show code in an easy-to-understand way. The company announced that it’s adding code blocks to its ‘smart canvas’ system, which will automatically add the proper spacing and color-coding for a variety of programming languages, such as Python, C, and Javascript.”

Washington Post: QAnon, adrift after Trump’s defeat, finds new life in Elon Musk’s Twitter. “Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.”

USEFUL STUFF

ZDNet: How to download YouTube videos three ways: Free, paid, and Linux command line. “So you want to download a YouTube video? While basic YouTube only offers downloads for a few selected videos in a few selected locations, there are ways to download any YouTube video you want at any time.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Sydney Morning Herald: Australia’s largest abortion services provider hit with Google ad ban. “Search giant Google has blocked ads from the country’s largest abortion provider, MSI Australia, for the last two weeks, claiming the ads violated its policies that are based on Australian law. But a version of the ads are likely to be allowed to go live after questions from this masthead, pressure from MSI and a review by Google.”

Android Police: Google’s parent company could slash more money-losing moonshot projects. “Investing in offbeat technology because a brand believes in its potential can quickly turn expensive. In a comprehensive report, The Information reveals the eleven currently active other bets cost Alphabet around $30 billion in operating losses so far, of which a $4.5 billion loss was recorded in the first nine months of 2022. However, the search titan has also acknowledged an economic slowdown with a freeze on hiring, and its recent quarterly report also reveals plans for fewer-than-usual moonshots.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

SEC: SEC Charges Eight Social Media Influencers in $100 Million Stock Manipulation Scheme Promoted on Discord and Twitter. “These seven defendants allegedly purchased certain stocks and then encouraged their substantial social media following to buy those selected stocks by posting price targets or indicating they were buying, holding, or adding to their stock positions. However, as the complaint alleges, when share prices and/or trading volumes rose in the promoted securities, the individuals regularly sold their shares without ever having disclosed their plans to dump the securities while they were promoting them.”

Reuters: Ex-Twitter worker gets 3-1/2-year U.S. prison term for spying for Saudi Arabia. “A former Twitter Inc manager convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia by sharing user data several years ago and potentially exposing users to persecution was sentenced to 3-1/2 years in prison on Wednesday, U.S. prosecutors said.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

LAist: He Logged Trending Twitter Topics For A Year. Here’s What He Learned. “Let’s say you wanted to create a record of everything that happened in 2022, through the lens of social media. Where would you start? Brian Feldman began and ended in the same place: the sidebar on the right-hand side of Twitter.com, which keeps a running list of trending topics in fields from sports to politics to entertainment.”

Mirage News: New tool to help maximise nation’s solar and wind potential. “A new tool developed by researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) shows the best locations around Australia that could be used to build new wind or solar farms.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 17, 2022 at 06:28PM
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Colorado Newspapers, Beethoven Beats, Google Search Status Dashboard, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 16, 2022

Colorado Newspapers, Beethoven Beats, Google Search Status Dashboard, More: Friday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Vail Daily: Old Vail Trail editions are now digitized through July 1992. “Vail in the 1980s can now be relived by locals online as ColoradoHistoricNewspapers.org has digitized the Vail Trail newspaper’s weekly collection through July of 1992. The newspaper is now searchable through the free website, which is a service of the Colorado State Library.”

Google Blog: The Blobs are back and teaming up with Beethoven. “Beethoven Beats, created in partnership with Deutsche Grammophon, celebrates Beethoven’s musical genius with a completely new way to discover his famous piano sonatas. You are invited to tap out a rhythm, which, through the application of machine learning, will be answered by the closest matching work from Beethoven’s extensive piano sonata collection.”

Google Search Central: Introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard . “As we head into 2023, we want to introduce another tool for the public to understand the most current status of systems which impact Search—crawling, indexing, and serving. While system disruptions are extremely rare, we want to be transparent when they do happen. In the past, we’ve worked with our Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to externalize these disruptions on our Google Search Central Twitter account. Today, we’re introducing the Google Search Status Dashboard to communicate the status of Search going forward.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Ghost Cult: Metallica Adds More Content to “The Art of Metallica” Virtual Exhibition to the Metallica Black Box. “It’s been one year since The Metallica Black Box opened its doors with the first exhibition taking a deep dive into The Black Album, followed with 40 Years of Metallica. This latest exhibition digs into the band’s personal collection of artwork and includes rarely-seen drafts of album art, classic t-shirt images, gig posters, fan tributes, video storyboards, Hetfield sketches, and much more.”

Engadget: TikTok is testing full screen horizontal videos. “The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that users chosen to be part of this test will see a button on square or rectangle videos in their feed. If they tap on that button, the video will expand horizontally to take up the whole screen.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

9to5 Google: Google kicks off ARCore Geospatial API Challenge with $50,000 in prizes for AR apps. “ARCore gained a Geospatial API at Google I/O 2022 to let developers more easily place virtual content in the real world. To encourage adoption, Google is starting the ARCore Geospatial API Challenge. This addition to ARCore lets third-party apps use the same global localization technology powering Google Maps Live View to add virtual content to real world coordinates and elevations in over 100 countries.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Washington Post: House committee asks National Archives to review Trump storage unit. “The House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the National Archives on Tuesday requesting a review to determine whether former president Donald Trump has retained any additional presidential records at his storage facility in Florida.”

Ars Technica: TikTok would be banned from US “for good” under bipartisan bill. The bill—officially known as the ‘Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act’ or the ‘ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act’—is designed to block and prohibit all transactions by social media companies controlled or influenced by “countries of concern.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

University of Georgia: New facial recognition technology scans your ear. “The ear is one of the few body parts that remains relatively unchanged over time, making it a useful alternative for technology requiring face or fingerprint recognition, said Thirimachos Bourlai, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the UGA College of Engineering. The ear recognition system Bourlai’s team developed correctly authenticates individuals with up to 99% accuracy, according to the new study (depending on the dataset and model used for testing).”

Hackaday: VHS-Decode Project Could Help Archival Efforts. “Archiving data from old storage media can be a highly complex process. It can be as simple as putting a disk in an old drive and reading out the contents. These days, though, the state of the art is more complex, with advanced techniques helping to recover the most data possible. The VHS-Decode project is an effort to improve the archiving of old analog video tapes.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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December 17, 2022 at 01:30AM
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Alabama Channels, Nuestra Cosa, Google Knowledge Panels, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 16, 2022

Alabama Channels, Nuestra Cosa, Google Knowledge Panels, More: Friday ResearchBuzz, December 16, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Birmingham Watch: Recorded State Government Meetings Available Through New League of Women Voters Channel . “The League of Women Voters has established a channel on which citizens can watch videos of the state Senate, House of Representatives and legislative committee meetings, searchable by keywords and phrases. The Alabama Channel is a new project of the League of Women Voters of Alabama Education Fund.”

UC Riverside: Historic Chicano student newspaper made available online. “For decades, Nuestra Cosa provided a platform for UC Riverside’s Chicano students to share their stories, poetry, and art with the campus. After the newspaper stopped publishing in 2012, much of that history became harder to find, with back issues tattered or fading away. A new project has made those voices available once again in a digital collection where readers can browse through the 40-year span of the newspaper.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Android Police: Google smartens up Search with dynamically themed knowledge panels. “Back in September at the Search On conference, Google talked about plans to make Search’s knowledge panel more contemporary, while remaining equally informative, and now we’re finally starting to see that enhanced interface arrive.”

Bloomberg: Hong Kong to ‘Use All Means’ Against Google Over National Anthem. “Hong Kong has strongly criticized Alphabet Inc.’s Google for failing to ensure the city’s correct national anthem features prominently on its search page. Typing in Hong Kong national anthem into the search box brings up articles and videos about Glory to Hong Kong, the unofficial anthem of the mass protests that rocked the financial hub in 2019, instead of China’s March of the Volunteers.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CBS News: “Iron Man,” “The Little Mermaid,” “When Harry Met Sally” among movies named to National Film Registry. “The latest additions also include John Waters’ camp musical-comedy ‘Hairspray’ (1988); ‘Carrie,’ Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King thriller, starring Sissy Spacek as a teenager gifted with telekinesis; and ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ (1950), for which José Ferrer became the first Hispanic actor to win a best actor Oscar.”

Charity Today: Historic Disability Rights Movement to be archived, thanks to lottery grant. “The four-year project will record and digitise these unique social history and heritage stories. These will be used to create an accessible and interactive website that is dedicated to the story of the Disability Rights Movement in the UK.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Rolling Stone: Russian Trolls Made Fake Kid Rock Fan Accounts — and Fooled Donald Trump Jr.. “Researchers found Russian-linked fake accounts posing as authentic American conservatives cross-posting content to personas on Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr. While right-wing social platforms like Gab and Parler have previously played host to Russian influence operations, the report marks the first documented case of Russian meddling on Truth Social, the social media app founded by Trump.”

CoinDesk: Canadian Securities Regulators to Strengthen Crypto Oversight After FTX Collapse. “The body, which consists of securities regulators from each of the 10 provinces and three territories in Canada, said it would be expanding its existing requirements for platforms that are currently operating in the country.”

CNBC: Sen. Warren presses Defense Secretary about ex-Google CEO Schmidt’s potential conflicts when he advised Pentagon on AI. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday pressed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin about his agency’s enforcement of conflict-of-interest rules for federal advisory boards, zeroing in on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt after CNBC reported on his past involvement on influential panels in an industry where he was an investor.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Slate: The Internet Is Having Its Midlife Crisis. “Many of us who have grown up along with the web are now reaching middle age, and we have enough experience with the internet to know what it does well and does poorly. And as with any midlife crisis, the internet can spiral into the abyss, continuing its own self-destructive pathway, or we can seize the moment to build a better internet founded on the essential principle that the internet belongs to all of us.”

WIRED: ChatGPT’s Fluent BS Is Compelling Because Everything Is Fluent BS. “The discourse around ChatGPT has flagged the damaging effect it might have on society, everything from the model encouraging torture and perpetuating sexism to enabling kids to cheat on their homework…. But to be honest, old-fashioned human-generated fluent bullshit—weaponized by social media—has already been pretty disastrous.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

Penn State: Model shows how intelligent-like behavior can emerge from non-living agents. “A new model by a team of researchers led by Penn State and inspired by [Michael] Crichton’s novel describes how biological or technical systems form complex structures equipped with signal-processing capabilities that allow the systems to respond to stimulus and perform functional tasks without external guidance.” Good morning, Internet…

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December 16, 2022 at 06:31PM
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Brian Friel, Linktree, Form Builders, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 15, 2022

Brian Friel, Linktree, Form Builders, More: Thursday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, December 15, 2022
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

The Irish News: New Brian Friel digital archive launched by Queen’s University. “QUEEN’S University Belfast has launched a Brian Friel digital archive providing access to drafts of the acclaimed Irish playwright’s works, including handwritten notes from some of his best known plays.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Tubefilter: Here’s what Linktree’s 30 million users linked to in 2022. “Linktree’s 30 million users generated nearly 20 million clicks per month on monetized links. By tracking the destinations of those links, two big winners come to the fore: BeReal and TikTok.”

USEFUL STUFF

MakeUseOf: 5 Free Online Form Builders to Create Beautiful and Easy Surveys. “Google Forms is the internet’s favorite free form builder, and rightly so. You can do so much with it. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only form builder you should consider. A few new form builders are making the process more user-friendly in different ways, like Tally, which works like a Doc, or NueForm, which makes it easier to create ‘slide forms’ that show one question at a time.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

WIRED: A Row Erupts Over Texas’ Bold Bitcoin Battery Plan. “The plan to use crypto mines as giant batteries is controversial, to say the least. Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, claims the battery analogy is ‘nonsense’ because miners don’t store and release energy, but rather only promise to stop consuming when it’s urgently needed elsewhere. And he disputes the idea that crypto mining will bring additional energy generation to the grid, which he describes as misdirection designed to distract from the price increases people will incur due to an overall rise in energy demand.”

The Verge: Livestreaming has gotten big, but is it business?. “Now, at any given moment, you can find thousands or even tens of thousands tuning in live to watch a court trial or a high school chemistry class or a Funko Pop collector selling his prized possession. How did we get to a point where livestreaming might be big business? We get into all that and more in the show.” ~36 minute podcast, I don’t see a link to a transcript.

SECURITY & LEGAL

CBS News: TikTok faces growing national security concerns: “It’s not just the collection or theft of that data”. “The Biden administration is investigating TikTok’s plan to house its data in the U.S. as part of a sweeping years-long review over whether the company’s ties to China are a national security threat. It’s unclear when the probe will end. And more scrutiny is on the way.”

The Register: Pwn2Own contest concludes with nearly $1m paid out to ethical hackers . “Pwn2Own paid out almost $1 million to bug hunters at last week’s consumer product hacking event in Toronto, but the prize money wasn’t big enough attract attempts at cracking the iPhone or Google Pixel because miscreants can score far more from less wholesome sources.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

TechCrunch: OpenAI’s attempts to watermark AI text hit limits. “Did a human write that, or ChatGPT? It can be hard to tell — perhaps too hard, its creator OpenAI thinks, which is why it is working on a way to ‘watermark’ AI-generated content. In a lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, computer science professor Scott Aaronson, currently a guest researcher at OpenAI, revealed that OpenAI is developing a tool for ‘statistically watermarking the outputs of a text [AI system].'”

Columbia News: What Is the State of Data Science Today?. “In recent years, the field of data science has exploded into the mainstream, and into our daily lives. Data science now touches nearly every aspect of society and affects how governments, the private sector, the healthcare profession, and many other vital sectors operate.”

Engadget: DeepMind created an AI tool that can help generate rough film and stage scripts. “Have you ever thought up an idea for a movie or play that you just know will be a smash hit, but haven’t gotten around to writing the script? Alphabet’s DeepMind has built an AI tool that can help get you started.” Good afternoon, Internet…

Do you like ResearchBuzz? Does it help you out? Please consider supporting it on Patreon. Not interested in commitment? Perhaps you’d buy me an iced tea. I love your comments, I love your site suggestions, and I love you.

December 16, 2022 at 01:26AM
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